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bland

[bland]

Example Sentences Origin

adjective, -er, -est.

pleasantly gentle or agreeable: a bland, affable manner.

soothing or balmy, as air: a bland southern breeze.

nonirritating, as food or medicines: a bland diet.

not highly flavored; mild; tasteless: a bland sauce.

lacking in special interest, liveliness, individuality, etc.; insipid; dull: a bland young man; a bland situation comedy.

EXPAND

unemotional, indifferent, or casual: his bland acknowledgment of guilt.

COLLAPSE

Origin:
1590–1600; < Latin blandus of a smooth tongue, pleasant, soothing

Related forms

bland·ly, adverb

bland·ness, noun

Synonyms
1. affable, mild, amiable; suave, urbane. 2, 3. soft, mild.

Antonyms
1. cruel; boorish. 2. harsh. 3. irritating.

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Bland is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle.

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Example Sentences

For the first time, Jen's writing is bland and unremarkable.

It's a peculiar task, this job of trying to make bland tomatoes taste good.

Transform a bland garden with clever reuse of on-site materials.

EXPAND

Dictionary.com Unabridged

noun

James A(llen), 1854–1911, U.S. songwriter and minstrel performer.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To bland

Collins

World English Dictionary

bland (blænd)

—*adj*
1.	devoid of any distinctive or stimulating characteristics; uninteresting; dull: bland food
2.	gentle and agreeable; suave
3.	(of the weather) mild and soothing
4.	unemotional or unmoved: a bland account of atrocities

[C15: from Latin blandus flattering]

'blandly

—*adv*

'blandness

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

bland

1660s, from It. blando "delicate," or O.Fr. bland "flattering, complimentary," both from L. blandus "mild, smooth, flattering, alluring," perhaps from PIE *mlad-, nasalized variant of base *mldu- "soft." Latin also had blandiloquentulus "flattering in speech," which might have yielded a useful English

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*blandiloquent.

COLLAPSE

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"Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could have thought he had never developed a "style" is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson's prose. The latter's sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn't have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars."

-Louis Auchincloss

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